More Cycles

In conjunction with using Cycles for animation (which looks pretty slick, although time consuming on account of there being no support for texture baking at the moment), I have been working on reducing noise and fireflies that present themselves often when using Cycles. I found a good combination is to use limited global illumination in the integrator to reduce the amount of caustic light bounces, turning off "sample as lamp" for most light sources, and kicking up samples to 1000-2000 for a still shot. Tried out using Cycles for my new resume design.

Stargate Temple

I've been wanting to jump into Blender's Cycles engine so I went ahead made this simple Stargate scene. Cycles is pretty amazing, to say the least. Way more robust than the old internal renderer. Reflectivity, bump mapping, and lighting is a lot more natural and realistic. Depth of Field has been rebuilt where you no longer need to use a compositing node and you don't get those bad looking artifacts when an object cant decide whether it should be in focus or out of focus. The best feature though is the real time renderer. You can edit, move, and model elements within your scene and have Blender constantly updating a low sample render view so you can see what your changes actually look like. No more, sitting around for a twelve hour render only to realize your texture isn't mapping right, or the lighting isn't strong enough. 

Lil' Robo

Been working on rigging a little robot model for a short animation. Then I wanted to do a photo composite.

Snail

Test render for a BFA photo project. Been familiarizing myself with GLSL texture painting.

Subway- Altered Perspective

Trying out the simple deform modifier...a very useful, quick way to get really elegant bends and twists out of complex objects that would normally take forever to model by hand.

Ornithopter

Ornithopter Commercial

A project I have wanted to do for a while. Based on the description of ornithopters in Frank Herbert's Dune saga. The design was drawn in Photoshop, then modeled, rendered, and animated all in Blender 2.59.

Walk cycle

Having fun wit' haters

Final animation progress

I have the two characters modeled and the rigs built so far, along with some of their accessories modeled (not rendered).

this was the concept drawing for Constructo.

This is the most recent render of the two characters.

Playing with Fiyuh!

Used the smoke modifier to create some fire

Fire test from Brett Ciccarello on Vimeo.

Testing particles

Testing out Blender's new fluid physics for particle systems on recreated geometry of the EMU stairs.

Particle Test from Brett Ciccarello on Vimeo.

Orbits

Orbits from Brett Ciccarello on Vimeo.

Reaper

Reaper from Brett Ciccarello on Vimeo.
I finished the second version. The tracking is much better, and I did manual masking in AE. I like the timing of the animation a lot better and I figured out how to properly parent an armature to a path without it deforming the mesh in strange ways.

Progress!

I have started modeling the "Death" character. Routine stuff. What I'm really excited about is finally sitting down and taking time to learn how to make an IK rig. I based the rig construction on what I remembered from the human meta-rig that used to be included in older versions of Blender, and used a tutorial to help with figuring out how to make a good IK setup. The most useful thing I found was being able to use unparented bones as IK controllers so the bone chain doens't get confused and start freaking out, and some bones as pole targets for the elbows and knees so they are always point the right direction.

Also, using B-bones instead of the default bone shape allows you to segment a single bone into many little pieces and applies a bezier curve when that bone is moved (the amount of curve can be manipulated), which allows for a natural curving of the spine, and the forearm to twist from elbow to wrist.

Hopper v2.0

New and improved with pans, dollies, and epic angle jumps.

Hopper V2.0 from Brett Ciccarello on Vimeo.

Afghanistanimation

Humorous demo reel that shows some epic skills.

dono demoreel 2011 from dono et frenchman on Vimeo.


Hopper from Brett Ciccarello on Vimeo.


Monkey DoF from Brett Ciccarello on Vimeo.

Kuhniget!

http://www.vimeo.com/20800485

Messing with Materials

The Shiny knight looks pretty badass...but it takes so long to render. Going to have to find a way to simulate metal without using reflectivity. The toon knight was just for fun, but I like the result.

Knight Model

Knight gesture model + simple animation

World's Largest and Most Complicated Rubik's Cube

An interesting article relating to 3D work.